


Engineers Wear Red Shirts, Too

by Jedi Buttercup (jedibuttercup)



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV), Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Crossover, Gen, Gift Fic, Post-Star Trek: Into Darkness, Red Shirt, Wordcount: 1.000-5.000, away team mission
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-15
Updated: 2016-08-15
Packaged: 2018-08-08 23:48:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7778398
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jedibuttercup/pseuds/Jedi%20Buttercup
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Oz knows there's no mission like an away mission with half the senior staff in the line of fire.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Engineers Wear Red Shirts, Too

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Vashti (tvashti)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tvashti/gifts).



> For the request: Oz, with the prompt "Vulcans aren't always the coolest heads in battle."

Oz was no stranger to high stress environments. Really, seriously not; after nearly three centuries of existence as a mostly-tame werewolf-- he'd never found out for sure why; though most of his guesses began and ended with Willow-- he had a _lot_ of experience in keeping his cool. And he'd been pretty even-keeled to begin with.

That was probably the only reason he didn't flinch when he walked into the _Enterprise_ transporter room, carrying his heavy electronics kit, and saw who else was on the away team. He exchanged a glance with Lieutenant Hendorff, the senior of the three security guys joining him, Commander Spock, and Dr. McCoy, and gave the stressed-looking junior officer a sympathetic grimace.

They both knew the Captain, the Communications Officer, and two other security had gone down to the planet that morning, investigating the disappearance of a Federation team researching the ruins of a long-vanished advanced culture. Oz had seen the preliminary reports the team had sent back before their comms went silent, hinting at computer architecture beyond anything Starfleet could boast, based on some kind of crystal tech. And the Doctor was gritting his jaw like a Slayer tracking an unknown, elusive foe.

Yeah; there was no mission like an away mission with half the senior staff in the line of fire.

He settled the strap of the bag more securely on his shoulder as he greeted the Commander and stepped onto the transport pad, thinking of his days in Sunnydale. Of those occasional times when all the Scoobies had laid their lives on the line, because the situation was just that dire and Buffy was only one person, Slayer or not. Things were supposed to be different in Starfleet, though; they had a lot more people on board for back up, and regulations advising _against_ taking all the people in charge of running the ship _off_ the ship at the same time.

Judging by the look-- or careful lack of one-- on the First Officer's face at the moment, though, nobody was going to be reminding him of that anytime soon.

Oz knew the difference between careful management of one's emotions, and complete suppression of them to keep from flying off the handle, from personal experience. And he'd heard the scuttlebutt, same as anyone else on the ship who hadn't been there to see certain things first hand.

"Mr. Osbourne," Spock said as he returned his greeting. "You located the equipment I asked for?"

Oz patted the bag with one hand. "Computer interface tech?"

Spock inclined his head. "Lieutenant Uhura was in the midst of translating what she believed to be a warning message in the language of the original habitants when the away team's signal was lost. According to the natives of the village located some three kilometers distant, the original team was led to roughly the same area by their guide before they were lost as well. The largest concentration of crystal technology exposed for study was also found in that room. You are to attempt to interface with this technology and determine whether it includes capability for matter to energy transmission."

Or for any kind of energy projection technology. How'd that old Bond quote go? _Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action_. "Understood, sir."

"Lieutenant Hendorff and Ensign Johannsen will remain with you. The remainder of the away team will explore other possible alternatives to the disappearance." Final, hasty instructions delivered, he nodded to Lt. Commander Scott at the control console. "Mr. Scott? You have the coordinates?"

"Aye, lad. You bring 'em back in one piece now, y'hear?"

Spock's expression went even flatter at that, if possible; one tilted eyebrow angled further up. "I will endeavor to return them in the same number of pieces in which they departed," he replied, pedantically.

Damn. Oz shook his head as the transport beam initialized, wondering if anyone else had heard the icy _thank you, commander, for stating the obvious_ underneath the words.

* * *

The ruins were eerily beautiful from the outside, constructed of some kind of metallic compound that shimmered a blueish-green in the light of the planet's sun. According to their tricorder scans, it wasn't the after-effects of a time-driven chemical reaction, like the greenish patina copper acquired over time back home, the blueing of heated steel, or the tarnish the other Scoobies had once polished off Giles' silver knife collection. It was a natural property of the metal, and probably the reason the ancients had used it so much in construction. Judging by the fluid, sweeping lines of their buildings, the way the ruined city's layout flowed with the terrain, and the airiness of the rooms that housed the crystal technology, they'd been at least as concerned with form as they were with function.

Oz didn't think he'd been in a single server room, back on Earth, that hadn't been a closed, artificially lighted box, surrounded by _more_ technology to keep the computers from overheating. Even the advent of duotronics hadn't fixed that problem completely; a starship's Jeffries tubes were no place for a claustrophobic person. The pedestals and wall-mounted displays that contained this extinct culture's crystal computers were like an artwork exhibit in a vast, vaulted museum by comparison.

He directed Hendorff and Johannsen to stay in the hall, just in case whatever had taken the others took Oz as well. He didn't see anything that looked like a molecular imaging scanner or a Heisenberg compensator or any of the other parts of a Federation transporter, but that didn't mean the builders hadn't figured out some _other_ way to fling people around the cosmos. Better safe than sorry. Then he rolled up the cuffs of his uniform sleeves, opened his kit, and got to work.

The stress level had dropped measurably when he parted with the rest of the away team at the beam-down point, but Oz's hackles had raised again the moment he walked into the room. Even after all this time, the wolf's instincts caught more than his human perceptions could. He'd been hoping the other possibility was right, and that Spock and McCoy's expedition to the nearby village would turn up the missing people safe and sound as part of some kind of low-tech kidnapping ring, but that unfortunately seemed less likely with every reading his scanning equipment took.

There was plenty of trace organic material in the room and several footprints left in the dust by previous visitors-- but every lost skin cell traced back to the DNA of a crew member, and every single print matched marks left by regulation Starfleet footwear. And the computers were _definitely_ not asleep; he could detect the energy stored in the crystals in the various panels without even touching them. Especially inside the pedestal nearest a heavily inscribed plaque, creating patterns in the lattices within the gemstone-clear material.

They weren't complex enough to hold a person's transport scan, though; that was the first thing Oz checked. He sighed, shook his head, then started trying to isolate the details of the energy flows, hoping to get some kind of handle on the programming structures they used. It was always a long shot attempting to hook into alien systems, but this culture-- judging by the proportions of their equipment and the morphology of the extant natives-- had been bipedal, communicated vocally, and saw in similar color ranges to humans; that should make it easier to get a handle on their logic. Starfleet's limited AIs could interpret and extrapolate a _lot_ , as shown by the qualified success of the Universal Translator, but every parameter he could input would help.

He roughed out a scan program, then linked his PADD to his tricorder and set it to run. Then he started a more careful examination of the room. What with all the advanced technology in modern cultures, a lot of people didn't bother to check their Mark One Eyeball first; it couldn't hurt.

"How's it coming in there, Osborne?" Hendorff asked after a while. "You're awful quiet; if we weren't standing right here, I'd think you disappeared the way the other teams did."

"Puzzling," Oz replied, shortly. "I can tell they were in here, but that's about all. Scan's running; I'll let you know when I find more."

Hendorff snorted, but went quiet again, splitting his attention between watching Oz through the open doorway and helping Johannsen scan the approaches for any sign of intruders.

The more Oz observed the room, the more disturbed he got; though he could tell their crewmates, and presumably the earlier Federation team, had walked all over the place, there was one area that bootprints entered but didn't leave from, in front of the inscribed plaque. The thing was, there was only one person's scent in that area; he'd stood just at the edge of the zone where prints still pointed in the other direction and sniffed deep, and only picked up Uhura's light perfume. It had been too long to tell if the same thing had happened to the first group, but clearly, there was something in the tech or physical sensors or both that functioned as a tripwire; once activated, whatever tech had grabbed them had cleared the entire room.

He frowned at the plaque a moment longer, wondering what exactly it said; it didn't match any script in the Enterprise's database, and the Universal Translator only worked on spoken language. Whatever linguistic skill Uhura had been using to try and decipher it, wasn't something the average Federation citizen would have available. So it had to be warning the native populace. But the native populace never came here.

...And yet the plaque wasn't dusty. Not even in the deeper engraving of the letters. Oz peered at it more closely to make sure, on the edge of calling forth the wolf, and sure enough, it was as pristine as the Enterprise's dedication plaque back aboard the ship. Given the dust on the floor, _that_ was definitely an anomaly.

"Huh," he said, staring at it, then blinked and picked up his PADD as the tricorder beeped with a result.

"That can't be good," he added, eyebrows rising, as his analysis program announced a probable 95% match with known programming types. That was flat _impossible_ , unless....

Well, there _had_ been a known recent bad guy with hefty Federation coding behind him, and entirely nefarious goals for all of humanity. Organizations like that didn't come cleanly out of the ground, all roots attached, at the first pull from a countering authority.

He swallowed, then keyed his communicator. "Hey, Commander Spock."

"Report," the Vulcan's voice carried through the device, the word even more clipped than usual. Not even an acknowledgement of who was speaking for the records; yeah, he was pissed.

"So, it looks like this might be a trap," he said, wrinkling his nose. "Specifically, for us."

"Lieutenant Osbourne?" the First Officer replied. "On what do you base this conclusion?"

Oz shrugged. "The crystal computers are full of encrypted Federation logic patterns. Seems a little shady. So I'm going to spring it."

He'd leave his PADD with Lieutenant Hendorff, but he was pretty sure the direct solution would be faster than setting his personal code-dogs to crack into the software. Because there'd be no point in the bad guys having taken any hostages anywhere else; not if they meant to use them to forward the same goal that had driven Admiral Marcus. The Enterprise was _here_ , after all, and an arm of the Romulan Neutral Zone ran just beyond this solar system. 

And unlike the previous teams, Oz had brought along a transponder patch, courtesy of Lt. Commander Scott. Proper preparation, et cetera; Wesley Wyndam-Pryce might've been more use as a PI than a Watcher, but he'd had that much right in his speeches to Buffy. It was too bad the guy hadn't lived to see the Federation; he'd have made a great security officer.

Most of the Scoobies would have, actually. Adapt, adjust, survive. That something Starfleet seemed to have largely forgotten in recent years-- though the crew of the Enterprise were closer to that spirit than most. Listening to their engineer's seminar about the new warp transporters was why Oz had put in for a non-starbase transfer at last.

"Lieutenant, I order you...." Spock began, sounding as crabby as a Slayer in dire need of a target.

"Sorry, I think you're breaking up," he said, then tossed his communicator to an astonished-looking Hendorff. It wasn't like the thing would work on the other side anyway, given that no one else had called back, and if they weren't dead they'd definitely have tried. But the material the transponder patches were made of would light up on the Enterprise's sensors for at least a few seconds even if it went through a complete molecular dissolution on the other end.

He really didn't think he'd be risking that, though; setting a trap just to kill a few explorers would be a waste of all the effort that had obviously been put into this.

"What the hell are you doing?" Hendorff said, awkwardly pocketing the communicator and drawing his phaser, bracing for whatever might happen next.

"Investigating. You might want to back off some while I set this off." 

Oz calmly took the transponder patch out of his pocket, unwrapped it to activate it, and stuck it to his shoulder where it wouldn't impede his movement. Then he strode forward into the suspiciously clear space in front of the plaque, and winced as a bright white light flared around him, freezing him in place and then depositing him... somewhere else.

* * *

Oz blinked at the enclosed room he found himself in-- same architectural style as the ruins, larger space, complete lack of doors or windows-- and winced at the cacophony that immediately greeted him from the other occupants.

"Hey," he said, reaching for the phaser at his belt and finding it missing-- along with any other piece of tech on him bar the transponder patch. Which wasn't properly tech at all. 

Captain Kirk approached, shirt inexplicably torn as usual, with a slightly limping Uhura and the leader of the archaeological team just behind him. "Lieutenant... Osbourne?" Kirk asked, in tones as urgent as Spock's. "You're... computers, right? Spock send you down when Uhura's transmission cut out?"

Oz nodded, ignoring the Captain's attire; he didn't think he wanted to know. "Deduced it was a trap; presumably Section 31. Decided to spring it." He gestured to the patch.

"That's... genius, actually," Kirk frowned. "How did you know we'd be close enough for that to work?"

"Logic," Oz smirked, then turned toward a blank section of wall as it began to swing open, disgorging a bunch of, yep, black-clad Federationy guys wielding what looked like phaser rifles.

Two of them immediately pulled Kirk and Uhura out of the group, the threat to the others keeping them from struggling more than perfunctorily as the leader strode up to confront Oz.

"Who the hell are you?" he demanded, brow furrowed, then shook his head. "Nevermind. You bright-eyed do-gooder types from Pike's recruiting years are all soft, and Spock's a Vulcan anyway; we don't have to rely on the crystal transporter to strip his weapons. He'll throw them down _for_ us."

Oz remembered the expression on the Commander's face, glanced at the Captain and Uhura again, and felt the corner of his mouth turn up in a smirk. "Sure he will," he drawled.

Why did the bad guys always seem to overlook the fact that Vulcanoids were three times stronger than human, and much much smarter? And as big as this room was... everyone was standing awfully close, and they'd just put their backs to the empty part of the room. Maybe they were counting on the sound to inform them, but Scotty was a _genius_ , and transporters were his area of expertise. Suckers.

"Now you go stand over there..." the leader began to insist.

Oz watched the sparkling columns form silently behind the bad guys, then raised his hands toward the leader and made a bring-it gesture. "Make me," he said.

The first minion fell to a blast of blue light, even as phaser rifles turned in Oz's direction; two more followed before they caught on and began to turn back. Spock was a snarling, vicious blur as the two holding Kirk and Uhura began to aim their weapons; he was close enough to drop his own phaser and reach out, latching onto both men's weapons hands too swiftly for them to pull the triggers. He squeezed tightly enough to break fingers, then bulled right past them, leaving them to their former captives without a qualm.

Then he bore down on the leader like the wrath of whatever ancient Vulcan deity had ruled their original deserts. In his wake, the rest of the rescue team stunned the other minions with ease, and Dr. McCoy lifted his tricorder to scan the captives.

The Section 31 guy was already backpedaling like crazy, reaching out to drag Oz with him as a shield; but Oz was a lot harder to drag than your average human being. He dug in his heels and watched as Spock zeroed in, lifting the guy by the throat.

Chalk up another bad guy who'd never again mistake Vulcans for the coolest heads in battle, Oz mused.

Then Uhura got Spock to calm down and drop him, the Captain stunned the guy with a recovered phaser rifle, and Dr. McCoy strode over to poke at Kirk's shirt and swear.

Yeah; there was no mission like an away mission with half the senior staff in the line of fire. As it had been in Sunnydale, so it was on the Enterprise; yet another Tuesday in Oz's world.

He grinned at the scene, then borrowed a communicator off one of the security guys. "Commander Scott? One to beam back to the computer room. I left a few things there I really ought to go get."


End file.
